On The Feedback Trail

On Friday, Nige and I sent out some emails to friends and family asking for initial feedback.

It's great that people have taken a look and made helpful suggestions. As a result, Nige and I are implementing changes.

Some of the initial feedback includes:

• Too many distracting links on the homepage. One user found the 1 Goat, 2 People links at the base of the homepage quite intriguing but the not most useful for the first time visitor.

Nige and I have decided to reduce the number of links and no longer hyperlink 1 GOAT, 2 PEOPLE, 3,292 ENGINES, 216,014 TRAILBLAZERS, and 752,418 TRAILS.

• Description of Trexy needs to be more apparent.

We've decided to edit the text on the About page and the Tours to help make the description more apparent.

• Once you start blazing trails how can you switch engines?

The TrailBar works with hundreds of engines so you are not limited to just one engine. You can select which is your preferred engine to search with, but this doesn't prevent you from blazing trails on other engines. We'll add this to our FAQ to help make this clearer.

• When I visit Trexy, I get a popup asking me to save a file.

This is a nasty bug that happens occasionally. We are aware of it and have added it to the bug list.

The bug is caused because we are sending the document in GZIP >format. Normally it works fine, however sometimes the error happens when the user is behind a proxy and the HTTP headers are converted and the page is not automatically decompressed. This causes the "Save As" dialog box to appear.

Some suggestions for improved features include:

• Allow results to be grouped by rank, search engine used, country of origin.
• Allow trails to be edited or tidied up.

The feedback trail is on-going and we hope to mould Trexy in response to our users' comments to deliver the best search product we can.